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Arnold Reinhold writes "This month ends with the 125th anniversary of one of the most remarkable achievements in technology history. Over two days beginning Monday, May 31, 1886, the railroad network in the southern United States was converted from a five-foot gauge to one compatible with the slightly narrower gauge used in the US North, now know as standard gauge. The shift was meticulously planned and executed. It required one side of every track to be moved three inches closer to the other. All wheel sets had to be adjusted as well. Some minor track and rolling stock was sensibly deferred until later, but by Wednesday the South's 11,500 mile rail network was back in business and able to exchange rail cars with the North. Other countries are still struggling with incompatible rail gauges. Australia still has three. Most of Europe runs on standard gauge, but Russia uses essentially the same five foot gauge as the old South and Spain and Portugal use an even broader gauge. India has a multi-year Project Unigauge, aimed at converting its narrow gauge lines to the subcontinent's five foot six inch standard."

In the second half of the 19th century the US took rail transit very seriously. The standardization of the gauge isn't the only example of this. The US also spent a large amount of effort building the transcontinental railroad. A major reason for the success of the United States in the 20th century was the massive investment in infrastructure in the end of the 19th. Unfortunately, the US hasn't done much in the way of large scale infrastructural improvement since the building of the highway system in the 1950s. Our electric grid is primitive and outdated and our fastest passenger trains like the Acela high speed rail on the East Coast are slower than regular trains in other places like Japan (the maximum speed of the Acela is less than the average speed for some of the Japanese trains). I'm deeply worried about what the next few years are going to be like.

Our electric grid is primitive and outdated and our fastest passenger trains like the Acela high speed rail on the East Coast are slower than regular trains in other places like Japan

Both have the same core problems...

First, private monopoly large scale providers result in the inevitable property taxes levied on the routes, after all why not make the "outsiders" pay property taxes until they bleed... The owners can/might survive depreciation and interest costs of improved routes, but they'll never survive the prop taxes on improved routes. Its kind of like adding an extra 5% to the published interest rate in perpetuity, and taxes always and only go up making an unlimited liability for the private owners.

NIMBY is the second problem, for better or worse we operate sorta kinda partially under the rule of law, and we certainly have plenty of hungry lawyers out to stop all progress.

Yup, this is one of the major problems with some train routes in the US. There are tons and tons of train routes, the only ones you notice and get annoyed at are the ones with grade level crossings.

Nobody gets upset because there's a BART going by. But people (including myself) have to wait for Caltrain to go by in a lot of places. Thankfully I only bike over Caltrain's right of way about once every few weeks these days.

I know I'm stating the obvious for many readers. But that's because post WW2, oil was cheap, and driving equated to the ultimate form of personal freedom. So much freedom in fact that the suburbs were created in that time period too. Of course, cheap energy wont last forever. I can't predict what will happen in the future with regards to transportation, but I can predict that the current status quo will not last.

The problem wasn't our desire for freedom and independence with how we lived our lives. The problem was the instruments of energy we chose to achieve that without a clear vision or plan in mind to maintain it.

Still does. Try getting anywhere that's not in New York City, San Diego, or Chicago without a car, and you'll be spending a lot of time waiting or being herded where others want you to go. And you'd better plan in advance, because the bus isn't stopping at that quaint roadside diner you just saw.

Most of your quaint roadside diners were eliminated by the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. People stop are herded along the interstate and only stop long enough for gas, mcdonalds, and starbucks.

The current reliance on cars gives many areas the perfect excuse not to implement decent public transportation, which is pretty much why the US has terrible public transportation.

Cars may only be an excuse. I've lived in two different cities where opposition to public transit improvements came from people who wanted to keep their white upper middle class suburbs free of "others." In both cases the improvements would have allowed people living in poor (and mostly nonwhite) areas easy access to upper middle class enclaves. There's a reason people pay a lot of money to live in upscale areas. Aside from the nice landscaping and large homes the main motivation seems to be to get away

I know I'm stating the obvious for many readers. But that's because post WW2, oil was cheap, and driving equated to the ultimate form of personal freedom. So much freedom in fact that the suburbs were created in that time period too. Of course, cheap energy wont last forever. I can't predict what will happen in the future with regards to transportation, but I can predict that the current status quo will not last.

The problem wasn't our desire for freedom and independence with how we lived our lives. The problem was the instruments of energy we chose to achieve that without a clear vision or plan in mind to maintain it.

The low-hanging fruit in this equation is freight. If we could move a large portion of the long-distance freight to Rail, it would (1) relieve the interstate system and (2) save a lot of oil, since rail miles per gallon per ton is about 435. An 18-wheeler can transport about 36 tons and gets something like 7 or 8 mpg, which is about 250 miles per gallon per ton. Of course, there are other factors, such as the fact that the train will probably have a slightly longer route and that you will still need local delivery, but the potential savings, financial and ecological, are high.

I am an oil geologist ; finding new reserves is getting harder, and un-explored or under-explored areas are getting fewer and further from market - which is my specialism, and why I work intercontinentally and inter-hemispherically.

Actually... you've just proposed a problem for me - is there a hemisphere on the Earth where I haven't worked, and if there is, what would it's

As soon as solar and wind becomes cheap and efficient enough the natural gas and coal devoted to power production will be able to go toward syngas and Diesel production.

I don't think so. It is a Catch 22. If we could magically jump to 50% renewable tomorrow, that would make the price of oil, coal and natural gas go DOWN. This would make biofuels of all kinds relatively more expensive, including syngas and biodiesel. Regular diesel would be cheaper, but the US taxes it heavily (to capture funds from truc

You forgot about the cost of pollution. Oil and coal are artificially cheap because the people who use them to pollute don't directly pick up the cost, so the government has to step in with taxes.

Politics will drive the move to renewable too. In Japan there is more opposition to nuclear than ever now, so projects for generating energy from alternative sources are being accelerated. Japan doesn't have much in the way of natural resources like coal or gas and space based solar looks to be the way forward ther

Wind is far too inefficient (something like on average 25% of a given rating is actually produced) So 1MW are only really good for 250KW So to replace say a single nuclear plant you need several thousand wind turbines. Going bigger actually makes things worse. And the land and water areas required will make every cringe.

Direct solar is also horribly ineffeceint(20% for a given amount of space) and requires huge flat areas to work.

Solar Salt stands a decent chance, It still requires huge land areas however it can at least get up to decent MW levels.

Energy from nuclear reactors is not cheap at all. Even if you try to ignore the risk of a disaster, nuclear reactors are incredibly expensive to build and decommission and the story of cheap nuclear energy is a pipe dream that was never realized.

Why do you think the nuclear lobby complains about Congress? There is no law on the books against building new nuclear plants. Of course you have to get the permits, but Congress does not give those out, the various government agencies do, and they usually do give o

Fukushima was built in the late 60s, when nuclear was the wave of the future. But rather than build new reactors and decommission old ones they run those same old reactors until they literally fall apart. Nuclear power construction has improved since then but the only people getting new, updated, clean reactors aren't Japan or the US. If anything Fukushima residents should be blaming TEPCO first and the government second. The former should have shut it down ages ago and the latter should be authorizing new

That's what they said about the first generation of nuclear reactors. "Too cheap to meter" was the phrase. But we're still in the situation where heating a house using electricity is an expensive option, and even the 'cheap' option of natural gas heating is too expensive for some people during the winter.

Nuclear reactors exist within an electricity market and will sell their electricity for whatever they can get for it. They also have to make sure that over the lifetime of the plant, they save up enough cash to fund the extensive decommissioning process at the end of the plant's life.

I'd like to know which country has an electric grid that makes the US grid look primitive. Japan still has the 50/60Hz split, the US grid has been 60Hz only since 1948 (albeit there are remnants of 25HZ systems for railway/electrochemical use). Haven't heard anything about Europe that makes it superior to the US. China might have an edge due to the newness of their infrastructure.

I'd like to know which country has an electric grid that makes the US grid look primitive.

I don't think it's so much that the US grid is primitive compared to other countries. Rather it is primitive compared with the available technology and projected needs. The monitoring and control equipment on much of the grid remains rather primitive, the wire infrastructure is fragile (major outages every time a serious storm blows through), many areas still depend on sending a person out to read the meter for billing, there is a too much interdependence without adequate safeguards [wikipedia.org], local generation (solar, wind, etc) remains problematic in many places, generation sources are relatively dirty, usage controls are primitive, etc. Most of our infrastructure was built decades ago and (IMO) too little was allocated for ongoing upgrades nor were the increases in demand adequately planned for.

The grid works but it's not nearly as robust, efficient or clean as it could be. That's the problem.

That depends where you live. Around here the power is rarely out for more than a moment, and even those times are infrequent. And really the only reason we notice at all anymore is because we're more used to having devices like computers that can reveal a power outage over night.

But in general, the power grid is what you make of it, if you're utility sucks, then you're going to get poor reliability. Around here we have a public utility which handles it and they by and large do a good job.

In France, I have a server in my garage. I moved recently, so I got a downtime, but it is the norm to get more than a year of uptime between power outages. I've lived a bit in the SF bay area, and what I got there was very very far from that. Not counting rolling blackouts, we'd rarely get two month without an outage.

Almost all major Western countries are suffering the same problem. Just because they're all equipped with the same primitive grid systems, it doesn't make it any less of a problem.

The grids as they stand were mostly designed 60 years to a century ago, principally for powering a few factories and keeping the street lights on. They just aren't designed for handling the intermittent power generation from renewables like wind or solar, or dealing with the intense surges that come of quickly charging large batte

I have been hearing people complain about the stability of outlet voltage in CFL topics for as long as these bulbs exists. One comment said something like: "These CFL lights don't reach their long life in real world applications. Maybe with the perfect outlets in test labs but not with the varying voltage in real life." I have never seen the voltage on my outlets vary, except for an occasional complete fail (due to a tripped fuse or something). My CFL bulbs seem to have the expected lifetime. I live in the

Western Interconnection and Eastern Interconnection are the two major, the three minor interconnections are the Québec Interconnection, the Texas Interconnection, and the Alaska Interconnection.

Western and Eastern currently have six DC connections and a giant connection is being built between Texas, Eastern and Western - Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via three 5 GW superconductor link

Coming from a country where you can run a 3kW power-tool from a single phase domestic plug / socket combo, then when your done quickly boil water in an electric tea kettle to make a nice hot drink, and at the end of the day wash yourself clean in a 10kW electric shower I can say that the US domestic supply at least looks pretty fucking dismal.

110V domestic voltage? Ungrounded, non-polarized plugs? 50A service? Are you referring to North America? If so, you're woefully misinformed, or ignorant, or both. With minor exceptions domestic service is 220V split phase. While most things in American households run on 110V (one half or the other of the 220V split phase) electric appliances like water heaters, stoves, ovens, and clothes dryers, run on 220V. Current building codes require grounded, polarized outlets, and the only place you find ungrounded, unpolarized outlets are old buildings that haven't been upgraded. Most new construction gets 200A service, and like the outlets, the only place you find mere 50A or 100A service is in older homes that haven't upgraded their service.

You'll notice I wrote 110v(P-E) as in phase to earth, the hilarious American "split-phase" system is merely a testimony to how poor your domestic supply.

It's hard to jingoism your way around facts, but you still made a good go of it.

It is true that in the US we use the three wire Edison system and that it does have 110v to earth while in much of Europe they use straight 220v with one side earthed. But exactly how the transformer secondary is earthed does not change the amount of available power. The Edison system simply makes it possible to easily have both 220v and 110v in the same building.

Your statement that the US system "necessitates the use of 2-phase supplies for domestic heating" is true, but I do not see how this is a disadvantage. All you are saying is that one must connect the two supply conductors of a large electric heater to the proper terminals in the service panel so that it will receive 220v. So what?

(Aside to US electricians: I know that in your trade split 110v/220v supply is considered single phase. The poster is calling it two-phase because the two hot wires are 180 degrees out of phase. If we were to use strictly consistent terminology, the very old 110 volt only service has a single phase 110 volts from neutral, almost all houses now have two phases 180 degrees apart at 110 volts from neutral, and many office buildings have three phases 120 degrees apart, often at 110 volts with respect to neutral.)

As other posters have pointed out, you are wrong about water heaters. Only the very smallest are ever connected to a 110 volt supply. You are correct in your statements about electric tea kettles and power tools. Since almost all outlets in the typical American home are wired between one of the phases and the neutral, they can only deliver about 1500 watts.

I suspect that the justification for the Edison system is that 110 volts is less dangerous than 220 volts. This system provides a (supposedly) safer 110 volts for most plug-connected devices while still making 220 volts available for those things that need it.

In other words, your complaint is not with the US electrical distribution network, but with the fact that 110 volt outlets predominate in the US home.

I believe the biggest disadvantages of the US system are that it requires wires twice as thick and that many appliances (such as air conditioners) that should be running on 220 volts run on 110 volts because the manufactures know that few users would buy them if they had to install a 220 volt outlet in order to use them.

Finally, yes, there are 50 amp 220 volt/110 volt service panels still out there. At least in New England they are now very rare. 60 amp was standard in the 1960's and nothing less than 100 amp is installed today.

Oh my god, I can't stand ANYTHING about my country not being the best out of all the countries ever; I'd better come up with some excuse to get defensive and turn it into a bad thing about the other countries so mine is best again!

Yes, there are reasons Europe's grid is better. That doesn't mean it's not...better. The GP was arguing that it wasn't better.

Seriously, not everything is about your smug sense of nationalistic superiority. You didn't design the fucking grid; what's it to you anyway if somebody says it's bad? Fix it, or accept that it's bad but you're going to focus on other things. Don't pretend that it's a good thing because Hitler. Or some damn thing.

The US has a freight rail system that is the envy of Europe. [economist.com] (Europe is ahead in passenger rail, but that loses money.) Intermodal traffic (containers) is way up over the last decade, and profitable. There's new rail construction going on, and rails and locomotives have been upgraded in recent years.

Modern large locomotives [getransportation.com] use what are essentially giant computer-controlled servomotors to drive the wheels, so that all the wheels on all the locomotives stay in sync and share the load equally, which means they can all be torqued up to just below where they start to slip. This means fewer locomotives per train, little or no wheel slip, and the ability to coordinate many locomotives spread throughout a train.

Last year, Union Pacific ran a train 3.5 miles long [youtube.com] from Los Angeles to Denver. Average freight train length in the US is now 6500 feet and climbing. That replaces a lot of trucks. Since Los Angeles built a no-grade-crossing rail connection to the port there, far fewer trucks are moving to the port.

Europe still has a lot of little 2-axle freight cars. Those disappeared from US trackage some time before World War Two, replaced by the standard big four-axle cars still used today. The bigger cars are also stronger, with a consistent minimum coupler strength, which means longer trains are possible.

Mixing high speed passenger trains and freight on the same track cuts severely into freight capacity. Each passenger train uses up the track time of six freights.

Ironically, one of the reasons passenger rail isn't taking off in the US is because it consistently gets bumped by freight rail.

Our little Sounder commuter train from Seattle to Everett is constantly pre-empted for freight traffic-- usually mile-long trains hauling nothing but smelly garbage-- and its reliability is so bad, I finally just gave up and moved back to the bus. Considering the train runs 2/3rds empty every day, I'm not the only one.

Yep, it is truly impressive to see these trains. I play golf at a course next to the rail lines that head out from LA to Cajon Pass. The trains have 4 diesels in front and two in the rear and all working hard to make the grade that has begun.

the US government was not building rail lines. The majority of rail lines built in the 180s were done by private businesses, many without any grants or federal assistance. As such we have an abundance of rail still to this day for moving freight. As society improved roads became dominant because people valued their freedom, freedom to travel and where to live, all within their means.

I don't understand why so many bemoan out passenger train service. There are only two profitable lines in the world and all th

Most of the energy losses at ~200 mph, are aerodynamic, not friction. Rail does not help there.

Even here Rail helps. If you have a 1600 passenger train half full, you have only one front with air friction per 800 passengers. With cars seated two each you need already 400 fronts where each one creates its own air friction. So even the most aerodynamically perfect cars wont come close to a single train even with no consideration going into air friction.

"Standard Gauge is thin. Standard Gauge is beautiful. Standard Gauge goes anywhere and lasts all day. There’s not right way or wrong way. It’s crazy powerful. It’s magical. You already know how to use it. It’s 11,500 miles of track and counting. All the worlds” interchanges in your hands. It’s 4 ft. 9 in., standard. More rail than you could ride in a lifetime. It’s already a revolution and it’s only just begun."

I suspect that one General Sherman's er... enthusiasticremoval [wikipedia.org] of southern legacy hardware really helped speed up the transition. He did have a real air of resolve when it came to dealing with insurgents.

Eh, those were just illegal enemy combatants, hardly to be afforded the protections of the Geneva convention that hadn't been written yet. Whatever was necessary to drag Jefferson Davis out of his spider hole, and all that. 4/11/61! Never Forget!

"This month ends with the -125th anniversary of one of the most remarkable achievements in the technology future. Over two days beginning Monday, May 31, 2136, the gui manager for the linux desktop was converted from the old-earth version one to one compatible with the slightly narrower one used in the space federation. The shift was meticulously planned and executed. It required one side of every gui to be moved three inches closer to the other. All font sets had to be adjusted as well. Some minor animatio

How did they get the work done on time? How many people were involved?

11,500 miles/track is around 32 million railroad spikes that have to be pulled and respiked in the new location. If it takes one person 20 seconds to pull a spike and rehammer it in, it would take a crew of 16,000 people working 16 hour shifts to do the work in 3 days. And this is only the guys that are doing the spiking, it ignores the thousands of others that would be involved in moving (and lengthening/shorting curved sections when necessary) the rails, altering the running stock gauge and handling the supply logistics for materials, food, water, housing, etc for these large teams. So maybe 20,000 - 25,000 workers were involved?

Here's what's written in a history of the Illinois Central Railroad. Note that this re-gauging, On Friday, July 29, 1881, predates the one mentioned in the summary by several years.

"Most railroads in Illinois conformed to the Illinois Central gauge of four feet eight and one-half inches, commonly known as the English, or standard, gauge. But in the South the gauge of nearly all railroads...was five feet.

"Owing to the difference of three and one-half inches between the gauges at the Ohio River, sleeping cars, passenger cars, passenger coaches, baggage cars, and the freight cars employed in service from the completion of the rail route in 1873 were designed and fitted so that cars could be run over specially constructed dual gauge tracks at Cairo, jacked up and converted from standard to wide gauge, or vice versa, by removing one set of trucks and installing another on each trip.

"In the spring of 1881, Clarke, having obtained authority to undertake the conversion, announced a plan which was without precedent in the history of American railroading -- a plan to change the gauge of the entire 550-mile line between East Cairo and New Orleans in the same day -- in fact, within a few hours! This was the first Southern railroad east of the Mississippi River and one of the first in the entire country to change from wide to standard gauge..."...

"To complete the herculean task, more than 3,000 men were distributed along the line. The work began as soon as it was light enough to see, and by 3 o'clock in the afternoon, every rail had been spiked into place in what the Railroad Gazette described as the 'the greatest feat ever accomplished in gauge changing!'

"Describing the methods employed, the Gazette said:'The west rail was moved inward 3-1/2 inches. All the spikes on the inside of rails to be changed had already been drawn, except the spike in every fourth tie on the straight lines and every third tie on curves. Spikes for the new gauge were already driven in every fourth tie and third. All necessary spikes were distributed on the ends of the ties into which they were to be driven. Each section foreman was furnished with a narrow-gauge hand-car and a full set of tools."...

"Clarke's feat was hailed as a "truly wonderful achievement," and in 1884-1886 when other Southern railroads began to lay plans for converting their lines to standard gauge, the leaned heavily on his instructions and experience."

Source:Main Line of Mid-AmericaThe Story of The Illinois Central RailroadCarlton J. CorlissCreative Age Press1950

The fact that the old Soviet trains ran on a non-standard gauge was a contributing factor to the survival of the Soviet Union from the German blitzkrieg. Germany was not able to immediately use the Soviet rail system to reinforce and supply its troops, and was faced with having to use a few captured locomotives while re-engineering the Soviet rail system to accommodate German trains. Because of this most of the supplies needed by the army had to be shipped by road, except there are a few months out of the year when Russian roads turned into rivers of mud...

Yes, they did. But it took *time*, and they couldn't do everything. The German railroad units mostly concentrated on advancing maybe half-a-dozen railheads for the entire Eastern Front. By the time winter started in 1941, advancing German forces had completely outrun the slowly reconstructed railways and were in considerable supply difficulties because of that.

I took the trans mongolian railway from Moscow to Beijing about 10 years ago. One memorable experience is that near the border between Russia and Mongolia (or Mongolia and China i forget) they will change the bogie's on the entire train because the gauges differ in russia and china. The entire trainset is lifted up; the bogies moved out and new ones put in place. A very memorable experience.

If the American south could convert to standard US gauge in only two days, why us is it taking the rest of the world so long to convert to US standard measurements? It can't be that hard to ditch the 4 syllable metric system for the more efficent 1 to 2 syllable Imperial system.

Yep. I sure want to leave Australia and move back to the US. I'm getting so sick of the higher salaries, greater number of holidays, mandated 4-6 weeks of annual leave, the more casual work-to-live culture, cleaner environment, low crime rate, higher life expectancy, affordable healthcare, booming economy, 1-5% unemployment (depending on State), good food, having decent quality TV news and current affairs (ABC/SBS), stronger consumer protection laws, massively lower poverty rate, having more choice in phone and internet services, not getting nudie-scanned or groped at airports, oh the list goes on. I'm just itching to get out of here!

Ok so that's a bit tongue-in-cheek - I'm a dual American and Australian citizen and still spend a lot of time in both countries. No emi/immigration required for me. And there's still stuff that the US has Australia beat at. The highway system there is better than in Australia (which suffers from having a huge area but not a huge population/tax base to fund things from). The cost of living (particularly housing) is less too (though, wages are lower which offsets some of that advantage). The natural environment is also more diverse (don't get me wrong - Australia is beautiful, but it simply doesn't have the diversity of environments and climates that the US/North America does).

But at this point in time I don't think you'd find to many Australians wanting to emigrate to the US. Perhaps the very wealthy, who would like to take advantage of the lower income tax for high earners. But Australia has been incredibly prosperous for the last decade or two - the middle class along with the rich. The financial crisis didn't even scratch it. Not surprisingly, it consistently ranks as one of the top handful of places to be (both in 'economic' and 'quality of life' indices).

Having said that, there is a HUGE number of Australian tourists in the US in the last year or so. This is because it's now incredibly cheap to do so: the AUD is worth more than the USD for the first time in history (thanks to the US Fed printing USD like it's going out of style). The buying power of the AUD in the US is huge at the moment. Combined with generally higher Aussie wages and the already-low prices of goods in the US, it's a shopping bonanza. I have guys at work ask me to get clothes and running shoes and stuff for them when I visit the US because due to the currency movements it's literally less than half the cost. Hell, for big ticket items, it'd be cheaper to fly to the US, buy it, and fly back, than to buy it locally...

I always thought the best gauge for trains was the standard N-gauge. I still have my Rock Island Golden Rocket in a box down in the basement. My gramps was an engineer for the Rock Island and I rode it from Chicago to the West Coast several times as a kid. What a magnificent train that was. It had a 12-bedroom sleeper car called La Palma and it was like taking a room at the Four Seasons from Union Station to Los Angeles. You'd fall asleep crossing the Mississippi at St Louis, lulled by the gentle motion and wake up in the Rockies.

The coffee in the dining car ("El Comedor") was a special blend. It was served in those silver pots with heavy, short beige and red china that said "Golden Rocket". Delicious roasted potatoes and pork chops. Man, that was one sexy way to travel. Screw Southwest Airlines. If there were still decent passenger trains in the US, I'd never sit in another cramped 737 with a smelly fat-ass on either side of me eating cardboard extruded cookies.

Obviously, your education was lacking in firearms training and the study of railroads. You should have put a couple years in the Navy. You would have learned that a riot gun is actually a 12 guage shotgun, and that a 5 inch 54 caliber gun's chamber is 54 inches long, and 5 inches diameter where it necks down into the barrel.

First "g" is hard, the "au" is a long "a" second "g" is soft. End it right there - the "e" is silent. I guess you could sound it out if I were to spell it G-A-J-E.

Obviously, your education was lacking in firearms training and the study of railroads. You should have put a couple years in the Navy. You would have learned that a riot gun is actually a 12 guage (sic) shotgun, and that a 5 inch 54 caliber gun's chamber is 54 inches long, and 5 inches diameter where it necks down into the barrel.

And perhaps you should have paid attention in your English classes. It's "gauge [wikipedia.org]", not "guage". There's no such word as "guage" in the English language.

To be pedantic, when referring to artillery, and specifically naval artillery, a 5"/54 caliber gun would have a barrel length of 270 inches; as the 54 refers to the number of diameters that the barrel is long, not the chamber length.

And of course there isn't much rail traffic currently between europe and russia, the rail stock uses different gauges.

Not exactly. In fact the rolling stock exchanges the wheels at the borders. The whole waggon gets liftet from the bogies, the bogies are rolled away, new bogies of the right gauge are rolled in, and the waggon gets eased down on the new bogies.

The TALGO train which is used between Spain and France has adjustable wheels to adapt to the different gauges.

Oh, I see you use the Microsoft theory of "standard" aka: make shit up that doesn't match what anyone else is doing, then try to force everyone to follow.(yes, I know you were being factious, so was I.)

English speech states the year last, and tends to have the month first.

Interestingly, not in countries which use the DD/MM/YYYY format. In the UK, it is quite uncommon to hear "May the 8th 2011", and far more common to hear "8th of May 2011".

I've often wondered about that in a chicken-and-egg sort of way. Was it the American turn of phrase, with the month first, that led to the US MM/DD/YYYY annotation, or is it the fact that the MM/DD/YYYY annotation is a US standard that has led people to adopt that turn of phrase? And vice versa for the UK?

There is a slight advantage to having 240v but not much. Cables can be thinner and carry the same amount of power since the amps are lower. But, for the highest power devices in US homes (water heaters, clothes driers, ovens, etc) they are already on 240V. For other appliances there isn't enough advantage to justify switching the entire country and changing billions of dollars of infrastructure. The efficiency advantage is small.
60hz has the advantage as far as frequency goes. 60hz distribution systems are slightly more efficient. 60Hz steam turbines are smaller than their 50hz counterparts, which saves material costs for turbine manufacturers (and the utilities who buy them). There is basically no difference to the end-user. All the advantages/disadvantages are on the utility and distribution side. Again, there is no compelling reason to change the entire US over to 50Hz, and change out billions of dollars of infrastructure.

But those are (were, it differs and is changing) on 400V three phase here. As is industrial equipment, bigger motors, welders etc (some of which are not uncommon in home workshops). And you don't have that available. The "European" system is 230/400V, not just 230V.

Actually, 277/480V is quite common in the states for commercial and industrial uses. You can get it in your house too if you are willing to pay for it, but most people are not since there isn't any compelling reason to do so. The monthly ser

I think most of the world works on 240/50. It would make travelling, a lot easier. Different plugs, sure that's easy, and adapters are small, but to have to bring converters with you, that's a pain. Although I have just looked up which countries use what [wikipedia.org], and actually it's not quite such a clearcut divider as metric/imperial.

No. Frequency is largely irrelevant. The only common (although probably not so much anymore) residential application I can think of are wall clocks with synchronous motors using the line frequency to keep time. Increasing the voltage would give you more usable power out of your common 15/20A household branch circuit, but that's it. Perhaps you could lower the total number of branch circuits by going to higher voltage, but I don't know how many people would really care that they have 1/3 fewer breakers. Or you have crazy ass things like the UK ring circuit [wikipedia.org].

Take a look at a lot of your electronics and you'll see that they probably accept a "universal input" of 50/60Hz between 100-240VAC. One distinct advantage higher frequency has is allowing smaller size of components like transformers. This is why you'll see things like 115VAC @ 400Hz in aircraft [wonderquest.com].

Some linear power supplies (think transformer, diode bridge, caps) that are designed for 60Hz will fail in ugly ways with 50Hz power. The current capacity of the transformer is reduced, and for power supplies that are already heavily loaded (which is disturbingly common for unregulated supplies) this can push them over the edge. (Not to mention the effects that frequency has on the desired size of filter caps, which might also be insufficient at 50Hz)

50Hz requires more iron in the core of power transformers than 60Hz. Similar effects apply to motors. Now that consumer electronics have switched to high frequency switching supplies, that's not much of an issue for the end user. It does still matter for the transformers used in the power grid to step down from higher distribution voltages to lower domestic voltages.

A friend once bought a laser printer in the US (60Hz) and took it to New Zealand (50Hz). The power supply handled the 120v to 240v issue, but the motor that fed the paper through the system couldn't handle the frequency difference so that when he printed, the image on the pages was compressed because the paper moved too slowly.

Incandescent lightbulbs are far to slow to flicker at that frequency (I can't believe they'd cool more than 10 degrees in the zero passing. It's just way to short) and CFL's have a electronic ballast which requires them to have a high frequency (about 5 KHz I believe). Large scale modern TL arrays (office) usually have an electronic ballast too (and thus are at a high frequency). Old small scale TL's do flicker at 50 Hz and can cause headaches.

Houses are already wired for 240v, just not most appliances so not most outlets. Few residential applications use synchronous motors, so the frequency doesn't matter much (beyond higher frequencies allowing smaller transformers). And at least mainland North American countries all use the same plug.

Since it started driving higher currents through the same resistance (in this case the human body)

It's very difficult to design your outlets to limit the current that will go through a human without limiting what will go through an electronic device, however lower voltages have less ability to overcome the same resistance to cause large amounts of current to flow through the heart (which is usually the important bit in the "killing" part)

110v can kill you, so can 5v, or 3000v. But if I had to choose, I'd mu

Ah, yes arrogance. Let me guess - you're from Europe? That's the only part of the world that has the arrogance to insist everyone else should live, act, and think exactly like they do. Woe to the person(s) who don't.

I have to resist the urge to point out all the ways that Americans insist everyone else should live, act and think exactly as they do.

Ah that's relatively easy. A harder problem is adjusting the radii of all those curves. The hardest part is stretching all the bridges, tunnels, and viaducts 3 inches wider. And X crossings. Even station platforms might have to be moved...